Chapter 3
Growing up in a family who fostered, you got used to waking up to strange children sitting at the breakfast table. And alongside my nice, geeky, middle-class friends who enjoyed swimming lessons, Girl Guides and youth group, I learned to love all different kinds of strange.
To keep things simple, our foster siblings were mostly girls. The few boys that we did welcome were always several years younger than me. My parents specialised in emergency or bridging placements. That was, children who needed somewhere to stay for anything from a few nights up to a year until the court made a decision about their long-term care.
Mum and Dad had been fostering for nearly twenty years, although they’d taken a year off when each of their daughters was born. To date, they’d seen thirty-nine children come and go, either alone or with a sibling. And now, on my sixteenth birthday, I’d mooched into the kitchen in my ratty old pyjama shorts and vest top to be confronted with the fortieth. Who also happened to go to my school. Oh, and did I mention that this was a he?
‘Libby, this is Jonah,’ Mum said in her chirpy, let’s-act-like-this-is-all-totally-normal voice, placing a stack of pancakes in front of him.
‘Hi.’
I already knew that this was Jonah King. Every one of the eight hundred pupils at my school knew.
I had an uncomfortable flashback to the one and only time that we’d acknowledged each other’s existence.
I was waiting in Reception at the local primary school. Mum had nipped to the head’s office to discuss the girl we were fostering, and as usual she’d ended up taking forever. On the other end of the row of four chairs sat Jonah, head buried in a fantasy novel. We ignored each other until he turned a page and a clump of other pages fell out, drifting onto the floor in front of him.
‘You must really love that book,’ I said, handing him the few that had ended up closest to me.
He shrugged, face intent on reassembling the pages. ‘It’s my only one.’
‘Right.’ I waited until the book was back in order and he’d started reading again before I replied. I mean, offering advice to the notorious new boy was not on my to-do list for today, but I couldn’t bear to think of someone being limited to one book. ‘You could try the library.’
He didn’t take his eyes off the page. ‘You need a form signed and stuff.’
I didn’t question why his parent couldn’t sign a form for him. I’d met enough kids in similar situations.
‘Here.’ It was automatic, digging out my purse and finding my library card. ‘You can have mine.’
‘No. I couldn’t.’ He frowned, turning away slightly, but not before I’d seen the hunger glowing in his eyes. They were a dark amber. A wolf’s eyes. A sudden question burst into my head – what would it be like to have that hunger turned on me? Swallowing away that mortifying thought, I stretched over and poked him with the card.
‘It literally pains me to see a book falling apart like that. Please, take it for my sake.’
‘Thank you. I can give it back to you on Monday.’ He reluctantly took the card, holding it for a few seconds before slipping it into the pocket of his battered leather jacket.
‘Keep it. I can use my sister’s. She never goes to the library, so she won’t care.’
A couple of days later I saw him at the back of class reading the next book in the series. A few weeks after that I got an email from the library informing me that The Twinkletown Fairies Save Christmas was a week overdue.
Now, on my birthday morning, Mum pulled me back into the present with a full-body scan before her eyes fixed on mine with a look that said, ‘That is not appropriate clothing, which you know full well.’
No lounging about in strappy nightwear in a foster fam, even if it was ridiculously warm for early March. I surreptitiously glanced at Jonah, his tall frame hunched over the table. No surprise to see him in his black leather jacket, the hood from a dark-grey sweatshirt covering chin-length, light-brown hair. It looked as though he’d slept in his clothes. I guessed he probably hadn’t slept at all.
The scowl I threw back at Mum said, ‘It’s my birthday. One of the rare days you never say yes to someone new staying, meaning I don’t have to do a risk assessment on whether my favourite pyjamas are appropriate.’
What we actually said out loud was, ‘Happy birthday, darling! Would you like to pop back upstairs and get ready for school while I make you a birthday breakfast?’ and ‘I’m not hungry.’
Part of me wanted to stay and damn well eat my birthday pancakes – Jonah King could deal with having to keep his eyes to himself. The other, loserish part of me was painfully aware that I’d not brushed my mass of dark-brown hair, and the new spot by the side of my nose felt the size of a marble.
I sloshed out a glass of orange juice and stomped out.
Mum caught me up at the top of the first staircase, on my way up to the attic bedroom opposite Nicky’s.
‘We’ll do your presents and cards after you’ve been out with your friends,’ she whispered. ‘You still look half asleep. It’ll be nicer to open them when you’re awake enough to enjoy it. Come and have some pancakes, though, once you’re dressed. Or there’s cereal?’
‘Whatever.’ I’d arranged to walk with my friends to an ice-cream parlour on a local farm after school, which was the part of my birthday I was looking forward to, but I wasn’t about to let her off the hook for breaking the promise about new kids on special days.
‘Oh, darling. Please don’t be like that.’
I climbed a few steps before turning to look back down, challenging her to provide a credible excuse for the apparition in my kitchen.
She pursed her lips. ‘They’d tried everywhere. It was three in the morning when the call came, and he’d been at the police station since midnight.’
‘Not our problem, though. Not today.’
‘Libby, it was us or a residential unit a hundred miles from his siblings. His school. His friends.’
I scoffed. ‘He doesn’t have any friends.’
She went very still. ‘You know him?’
‘He goes to Bigley.’
‘No. On the form it said somewhere in Mansfield.’
‘And, what? These forms are never wrong? He transferred after Christmas. Got kicked out of his last school for assaulting a teacher, according to the rumours.’
Mum shook her head, as if dismissing that highly relevant piece of information. ‘It’s only one night. He’ll have moved on by the time you come home.’
‘Only one night. How many times have we heard that before?’
Nicky found me attacking my frizz with a hairbrush a short while later. She perched on the edge of my dressing table, her sixth-form outfit of denim shorts, black tights and a stretchy T-shirt in sharp contrast to the grey skirt, navy blazer and stripy tie that made up my Bigley Academy school uniform.
‘Happy birthday, sis.’ She held out a small package perfectly wrapped in lavender tissue paper finished off with a silver ribbon, the edges expertly curled.
‘Mum said we’re doing presents after school.’ I took the gift anyway.
‘Because it would be weird for a vampire to have to sit through our family celebration.’ She pulled a face. ‘I want to say I can’t believe they said yes. But that’s not true. I can totally believe it. I just think it sucks. We always open presents before school, so you can open this one now.’
I unwrapped the paper to find a journal, the cover decorated with trees, in the midst of which was a tiny, enchanting cottage.
‘I know your dream is to live all by yourself in the middle of a forest. Now you can write out your dreams inside one. I know it’s not quite the same, but, well…’
‘I love it.’ I abandoned my hair to give Nicky a hug. I supposed most families knitted together through their unique challenges and adventures. But sharing our parents and our home with so many other children over the years, having said hello to foster siblings who became like genuine sisters and waved goodbye to some we couldn’t wait to leave, Nicky and I had bonded in a way that few could understand. When my friends grumbled about their brothers winding them up or sisters nicking their stuff, I wished I could make them appreciate the consistency of a person who’s been there for all the in-jokes and the tough memories and the quirks that make your family yours.
Don’t get me wrong, I loved that my parents did this amazing work. I’d cared about every child who’d spent time in the two little bedrooms below mine. But all too often, amidst the chaos and the meltdowns, the revolving door of social workers and what felt like every precious conversation with my mum being interrupted or overshadowed by children who had real problems, I longed for a cottage in the woods, just for me. A place where I could stroll about in my underwear if I felt like it. Where my thoughts and feelings mattered. This journal would become my hideout that year. My metaphorical cottage in the woods, home to my deepest feelings and what became my biggest, wildest secret.